Love + Hate (11 page)

‘So – what happened? Where did you go?’

‘The commune broke up and we dispersed to different places in the neighbourhood. Did you know that for two years, because I worked in the evenings, I looked after you as a child, while your mother worked as a journalist and your dad was doing more important things? I took you to school on my shoulders, we went to the park, we played together for hours, and I fed and bathed you at my place. There must be photographs of us together somewhere.’ He sat quietly for a moment. ‘I remember when you wanted a watch. I couldn’t say no to you. We went to a shop and spent all my money on it. Then you went back to your parents. You wanted them.

‘But your dad had a lot of women around, as radical political figures tend to, you probably know that. Then they both moved away. I was dumped, as if my relationship with you had been nothing. I believed in it; I’d helped bring you up. I was ready to be a parent.

‘You’ve forgotten me. It’s all gone. There’s no reason why you would remember.’ He got up and fetched her an ashtray. She offered him the joint but he shook his head. He poured himself another drink. ‘Perhaps I should go.’

‘Will you go back to the party? There’ll be alcohol there.’

‘Some of those people I absolutely loathe.’

She laughed. ‘But you said they’re your friends.’

‘They are my only friends, though I never see them now.’

‘You must envy them.’

‘Dear girl, at times tonight I was almost levitating with envy as I contemplated their houses, their furniture, their country places. Some of them made millions from the theatre and cinema – they had taken such good care of themselves.’ He was silent, before saying, ‘Do you have that address?’

She drew on her joint. ‘Sorry, what are you talking about?’

‘Your mother. I am available to go to Paris to visit her. Perhaps this weekend—’

Frida said, ‘You’re not in touch with her, yet you still like her that much?’

‘I knew her for a long time – and I was with her for two years, on and off. I took her to the theatre and movies when I received tickets. She began to love the opera. She had always been political, of course, and she had a lot of nerve. One night, I was watching TV, and suddenly she blazed onto some show or other, arguing with a revered church father, giving him a roasting which must have reminded him of a premature hell.’

‘She’s quieter now.’

‘Naturally. I made her cultured when she became bored by the vapid political struggle and the hippy Marxism. She wanted to grow up, read women writers and think for herself. I gave her books – I made her subtle.’

‘Subtle! If she actually came into the room now, you’d be terrified.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She would swing about grandly, looking at everything, and ask, “What do you actually have to offer now, Luca?”’

Frida poured herself another drink. He shook his head. ‘I remember her as more humble. Cristina said to me, “I’ll never know anything, Luca.” But I watched her grow, Frida.’

‘With or without you, she was certainly intending to grow, Luca,’ said Frida. ‘My father died and my sister and I had to settle down and adore her, always telling her how magnificent and competent she was. From her side, she thought we should just get up and get on with things. Why would we not become successful people? She was capable of great love – with a man. She believes she deserves everything. I dream she is a tower, or sometimes a giraffe, looking down on ugly us. She crushed us without knowing it. By the time I was fourteen I wasn’t living at home …’ She went on, ‘After the diplomat died Mother grew sick of galleries and lunches with the other less-than-merry widows. She began to go to Africa or Asia or Eastern Europe to write reports on raped women. She is even more irreproachable now.’

‘But I can still talk a little,’ he said.

‘The last thing she wants to hear about are the old days.’

He poured himself the rest of the vodka, dropped the bottle in the bin and said, ‘She knows how much I know. She respected my ideas.’

‘What ideas?’

‘About theatre.’

‘They’ll be out of date.’

He said, ‘My humour will get through to her.’

There was a silence. He noticed Frida was looking at him. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve been observing you.’

‘You must be feeling better, my dear.’

‘But are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re biting your nails and making faces. Your body won’t keep still. Try now – try and be static.’

‘Surely I am tranquil. I’m almost a dead man.’

‘Now, look – your knee’s jiggling.’

‘To hell with my knee, I’m bored,’ he said. He stood up abruptly and sat down again. ‘I wake up bored. It’s unbearable to have no place or point anywhere. Boredom is my cancer; it’s killing me. “He died of boredom” – scrawl it on my gravestone.’

‘Let me tell you something, Luca,’ she said. ‘Your anger is preventing you thinking what to do. You should meditate.’

‘I must? Do not mock me,’ he said. ‘Haven’t I tried to be kind tonight?’

‘You must meet me on Friday morning at nine. I will give you a free lesson. When you realise you enjoy it, you can sign on with me. Meditation helps with difficult
things like anxiety and fear. Believe me, you will feel calm.’

‘How can it be a solution to sit and do nothing? I already do that! Your mother would never recommend anything so ridiculous. She was full of ideas.’

‘Remember, I am not a telephone to her. I was always a bigger fan of my father’s suicidal extremity.’

‘You were?’

‘Mother rightly called Father “insurrectionary”. Don’t we need trouble-makers and tribunes of the proletariat? It shows greatness to protect the poor and exploited! You rant and choose to be offended rather than hear me.’

‘Hear your nonsense?’ He got up and gestured at the room. ‘Look at this place—’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s untidy, it’s even dirty. There is ash and candle wax here. Your clothes are on the floor, the glasses are dirty and the bins are unemptied. You, from your decent family, can barely care for yourself. And don’t you think I’m sick of fatuous ideas? Do you not have the ability to do anything to alleviate your condition?’

‘Like give you my mother’s email address?’

‘I understand now that it is an enviable talent, almost a kind of genius, to find a good partner. You and I – we haven’t achieved good marriages. Or even children, and certainly not financial stability. We are just clinging on. This is the new Europe: democracy, religion, culture – it
could easily be knocked out again. All of us are on the razor’s edge. The country has collapsed. Soon it will be the Muslims or the Chinese who will rule us – anyone who really believes, anyone with a passionate intensity. Your father – he fought, he believed.’

‘You look anguished.’

‘He had an authoritarian state of mind. He was unshakeable. It’s commendable and mad. It—’

‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Just don’t bother to say anything about my father …’

He opened his mouth. She got up, wobbled a little on her feet, gathered herself together, took a step forward – and slapped him.

After a time he said, ‘Will you tell your mother that you struck me?’

‘I don’t speak to her.’ She sat down again. ‘I haven’t spoken to her for months and won’t again until she gets in touch, and who knows when that will be. When the time comes I will ask her about you, yes.’ She went on, ‘I failed. I failed at my chosen thing. I failed for a long time. Failure was good for me. I found something else. I have begun to teach acting and Shakespeare to schoolchildren.’

‘Do they understand it?’

‘I’m a pessimistic optimist,’ she said. ‘I try to give people a vocabulary, a language, to express what they need to say. I love it. I enjoy it more than anything. What do
you love? What do you love to do? Really, it’s the only question.’ She shook her fist. ‘My thirties have been a bit shaky. But my forties will be a riot.’

He was still rubbing his face. ‘I’ll come to the meditation on Friday. I’m sure it will help,’ he said. ‘Do you use your spare room for the class?’

She opened her drawer and handed him a card. ‘No, why do you ask? Here’s the address.’

He put it in his pocket. ‘Thank you. But tell me, are you renting that spare room?’

‘It’s hardly a room,’ she said. ‘You had a good look in there.’

‘I could help you with the rent. I’ve served culture, in my way – I could put your books in alphabetical order. I’ll look after you again, Frida,’ he said.

‘It would be nice to have company. But I think I might get a cat.’ She sighed and said, ‘Don’t worry, Luca, there will be other paradises.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, why would there be?’

She stood up and opened the curtains. The light was coming up. He got up and stood beside her. Together they looked into the park opposite.

‘They’ll be opening the park soon,’ she said. ‘Will you walk across it? I’ll wave to you.’

‘Okay,’ he said, putting on his hat and coat. ‘I’ll do that. Goodbye.’

As he walked across the park, he was determined not
to turn and look back because she wouldn’t be there to wave. No one was sincere; and, anyway, he couldn’t possibly have anything she wanted. But, at the exit, he did stop and turn. He thought he should; it would soon be time to face important things. And she was there because she knew he would turn. She was standing, doing her breathing exercises, he guessed. And before he went away, he waved back.

I didn’t know I was coloured until I went to school. It wasn’t until much later that I knew what it meant. Books helped me: in Bromley Library in 1970, aged sixteen – around the time I was reading Ian Fleming, the Saint, P. G. Wodehouse, James Baldwin and Mickey Spillane – I found
To Sir, With Love.
As a half-Indian, half-English schoolboy living in the suburbs with no vocabulary for describing his experience, this 1959 novel about a black teacher in Cable Street in London’s East End was a revelation. At last there was a way to talk about race and what racism might do to someone. This had barely begun as a public discussion in Britain, except in the negative by people like Enoch Powell, who, in the midst of Britain’s imperial decay and decline, were attempting a resurgence of supremacy.

This straightforward and moving story of an educated Guyanese in a new-style ‘free’ school – a man journeying into whiteness, class, miscegenation and teenage sexuality – helped me see what might be possible for a tyro writer tackling a subject that had hardly been broached by British artists. Growing up in an atmosphere of casual
and deliberate racism, forbidden from visiting various houses, and with fascist groups like the British National Party around us in South London, I was beginning to think of how I might approach this material in fiction and begin to write myself out of the corner I was in.

With its reference to Rosa Parks and the early civil rights protests in the US, the novel begins with an insult on a London bus. A woman refuses to sit next to a black man because of his colour. It is a very clear beginning to the story. The woman wants this man to know something. It is not that he is merely dehumanised for her: she could, after all, merely ignore him or, in fact, not see him at all. But she doesn’t. He is not ‘invisible’ as he might once have been. In his essay ‘Marrakech’ (1939), George Orwell comments, ‘[I]t is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces – besides, there are so many of them! […] Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff …?’

But now, after the empire, and as London begins to change, the black man is too present, and so the woman becomes coercive. She insists, with her refusal to share a seat with him, that he see himself through her eyes and know his place. The insult not only creates a necessary distance between them – making it clear that he is abhorrent to her – but tells us that she is superior to him and
that this gives her the power to hurt. She could traumatise him repeatedly if she wished. At the moment of the insult he no longer has an identity of his own; he exists only as she sees him. She counts for more than he does and, because he is inferior, she can enjoy humiliating him. And we know, as she petrifies him, that she takes pleasure in it.

To Sir, With Love
bristles with such humiliations and the attempts of the new teacher, Ricky Braithwaite, to live with them. He has to. He loves the idea of Britain, though Britain doesn’t love him as much as he thought it might. Braithwaite has served in the RAF and now, after the war, is desperate for a job. He is a qualified electrical engineer, but because of his colour has been unable to find a position. He has been rejected repeatedly and told that whites will not accept a black man in authority over them.

To Sir, With Love
is a shocking novel because the desire to degrade and humiliate is so strong in the whites. Braithwaite has to deal with this constantly. As the only major black character in the book, this is the story of a man trying not to lose his mind while keeping his temper – a daily struggle involving him in such an awful, limiting self-restraint that it is difficult to know whether he is a saint or masochist. He has, unfortunately, to be good all the time for fear of descending into the clichés with which the whites surround him.

The desire to degrade and humiliate is not simply an
addictive sadistic amusement, although there is a great deal of that in this book. It is also the desire to sustain power: the power of whiteness, of whiteness as the norm, the core, the invisible standard of what a person should be in order to become entirely acceptable. This notion of whiteness begins to decline in the early post-war period, as the world starts to come to Britain, altering it forever. But in London, a city devastated by war, the pleasures of privilege and empire were never going to be easy to give up. Hence the desire to defend an already dead idea. The insult, therefore, is unambiguously and structurally supremacist. Blacks, Asians and others will always be secondary in derivation, with no identity of their own. They are like us, but never enough like us. They are separate; they are not authentic, but failures or ‘mimic men’, bad copies of the original. Their position is always impossible, which is how the whites like it.

Of course, as Ricky Braithwaite points out when teased and goaded to exasperation, there is nothing natural about this notion of whiteness as the supreme standard. It is as arbitrary and socially conditioned as every other moral ideal. The children begin to understand this because to a certain extent Braithwaite – under the descriptions of others – resembles the pupils he is trying to instruct. The immigrant, like the teenager, is gradually losing his home, his past, his safety and stability. Like them, he has been placed outside. He wants to be assimilated,
to find a position where he can live a fruitful life, but the whites will not have it, preferring the fantasy of the black or alien intruder. What sustains racial insults might be the wish for unstained whiteness, for purity and a healthy world in which the intrusions of others’ gratification don’t exist. But there is another sense in which the racist never wants the pleasures of persecution to end.

If blacks are considered, in this branding, to be savages – uncontrolled, greedy, noisy, over-sexualised, dependent and so on – there is a similarity here with the children Braithwaite is teaching. One of Braithwaite’s colleagues, Weston, considers his job as ‘survival’ and the children as barely human. But if a place has been assigned to them, there is always the danger they will escape their fate. Someone, somewhere – women, children, deviants, blacks, colonial subjects – could be getting too excited and will have to be suppressed. As Orwell recognised, as a colonial administrator in Burma, for the ruler the key thing is the maintenance of order and ‘the long struggle not to be laughed at’.

However, Alex Florian, the novel’s headmaster, likes children and thinks of them as individuals rather than as a mob or horde. He knows how they and their parents suffered in the war and the deprivation they are currently living with. Braithwaite based Florian on Alex Bloom, the headmaster who ran the St George-in-the-East secondary modern school on Cable Street where E. R. Braithwaite
himself taught. Bloom wanted to attempt a different way of interacting with children. Influenced by the work of Freud and his followers such as Melanie Klein and the psychoanalyst of children D. W. Winnicott, Bloom wanted to escape the Dickensian model of discipline, obedience and punishment to which English working-class children had long been subjected. Children were humiliated for their own good; nothing was feared more than the collapse of authority, which had to be sustained at all costs. But in the new thinking, new questions arose: what would happen if children didn’t represent the uncertainties of the adults? If they were not seen as having monstrous and uncontrollable appetites which had to be subjugated?

In
To Sir, With Love
the teacher Ricky Braithwaite sees that he has to change the children’s attitude to him as a black man before he can interact with them positively, before anything good can take place. Fear, submission and hate make only chaos. It’s significant that Ricky Braithwaite, despite Greenslade being a progressive school, doesn’t introduce more freedom into the situation in which he finds himself. He wants more rules, insisting on politeness and respect, knowing that we are profoundly dependent on the way others speak to us. He asks the children to read, explaining that they are made and constrained by language. This is why jokes and insults matter; no abuse is a trivial ‘one-off’. The insult is violent, political and authoritarian, part of a collective
view which can be resisted. Poetry, for him, provides better words for things.

To Sir, With Love
is partly a record of where we were in Britain at the beginning of the 60s. From this powerful testimony we can see what has changed and how we’ve remained the same. The language used about strangers and immigrants in the novel is used by fascists and fundamentalists today. Unsurprisingly, we are still people who love to hate, and are much bothered by what we imagine to be others’ pleasure. Their happiness is always more than ours; however much joy we might have, we have been cheated, deprived and exploited. We are missing out on something which the other, however poor they are, clearly enjoys. And what could be more intolerable than other people’s ecstasy?

The insult, which exposes this envy, excludes exchange. The woman on the bus and many other characters in the novel fear equality. What might happen if people encountered one another directly, without a barrier of subjection or oppression? But it is precisely because equality is unpredictable that it is also difficult and more dangerous than the dreary repetition of degradation. We will never not be ambivalent about others. We do know that worthwhile relationships can happen, and that equality makes difference possible.

Ricky Braithwaite knows he didn’t make the difficult world in which he has arrived, but he never gives up
resisting its deadness in his own way. He knows he can bring it to life through language. Appearance isn’t destiny if we change the way we speak. And we can find ourselves in books, as I did with this one.